The journey that started 18 months ago to create a next generation Amiga on commodity hardware has now reached its first major milestone by becoming a completely driver native Aros system powered by the energy efficient Intel Atom processor. This has been achieved with the supply of hardware and in some cases financial rewards to key developers in the Aros world. The plan with the following steps has been to create a base reference platform for Aros and the Amiga community to build on and support.

This for me marks the turning point of AROS becoming a "real" alternative OS. Very exciting stuff! Question for anyone who knows: How easy is it to develop apps that work on AROS and AmigaOS (and perhaps MorphOS too)? And/or how many apps are there that are released these days for multiple Amiga derivatives at once?

Usually Amigans use C and C++ and there are lots of Cross Compiling scripts facilities that make almost easy to create programs for multiple Amiga derivatives, but it also exists the problem that you must adjust the program according to the GUI and the OS version you are using (MUI 3 for AmigaOS 3.9, MUI 4 for MorphOS, Reaction for AmigaOS 3.9 and 4.X and Zune for AROS) depending on the AmigaOS-like system you intend to target.

For automated programming There is Hollywood Suite that runs native on AmigaOS, MorphOS, Aros and Windows, depending on the version you choose to purchase.

(As long as Hollywood has a reasonable price you can also decide to buy multiple licenses, and run it either on Amiga, Aros or Windows.)